Azure Storage has developed to bolster the evolution of Microsoft AI and enterprise cloud onboarding with a number of improvements.
Final January, we shared our reflection of 2023 and outlook for 2024—and what a 12 months it has been! Microsoft has been on the forefront of groundbreaking AI options, empowering finish clients, builders and IT Professionals within the cloud whereas accelerating enterprise migrations to Azure. Azure Storage has developed to bolster the evolution of Microsoft AI and enterprise cloud onboarding with improvements in platform infrastructure, product choices, and workload integration. A number of notable highlights from 2024:
- Azure Storage, the filesystem for AI on Azure, enabled mannequin coaching with exabytes of information and supported inferencing/AI purposes for startups and enterprises.
- Premium SSD v2 disks, our general-purpose block storage, continued to develop double digit MoM, with expanded integration for brand spanking new workloads like Epic and Oracle.
- Azure Elastic SAN, the business’s solely cloud native SAN providing, grew by greater than 10 occasions inside few months of common availability, highlighting robust buyer pursuits to transition from on-prem SAN to cloud.
- Azure Container Storage, our new Kubernetes storage administration answer, simplifies cloud native app growth with a unified expertise for all backing storage choices from ephemeral disks to Azure Disks.
As we enter 2025, our focus stays on our clients, with a imaginative and prescient to supply an clever information platform that maximizes the worth of their information. We measure our success by our clients’ success and can proceed to develop robust fundamentals and improvements to profit our clients and companions. We lengthen a heartfelt thanks to our clients and companions for his or her belief and collaboration, driving us to realize extra collectively.
Fundamentals for Innovation
Underneath Microsoft’s Secured Future (SFI) initiatives, we’ve strengthened safety throughout a number of classes—safety by default, design, and operations—leading to important platform enhancements in id and secret safety, community safety, engineering programs safety, monitoring, and safe design evaluation. We additionally launched customer-facing capabilities for safety and information safety, together with Microsoft Defender assist for Storage, Purview safety insurance policies assist (in preview), Community Safety Perimeter (in preview), and TLS 1.3 Blob assist. We have now plans in 2025 to develop our safe by default posture throughout numerous choices, with insurance policies leveraging identity-based authentication and discouraging nameless entry.
Our investments in platform resiliency give attention to proactive mitigation of impactful buyer points through predictive evaluation. We achieved 52% discount in excessive impression incidents within the second half of 2024 in comparison with 2023. In parallel, we proceed to empower clients in constructing extremely out there (HA) options and enhancing our enterprise continuity and catastrophe restoration (BCDR) assist through capabilities like multi-volume snapshots for Premium SSD v2/Extremely Disks, and deliberate failover for Blobs and Recordsdata (in preview). In 2025, we are going to leverage AI and construct automation to additional improve failure prediction and detection, decreasing each the prevalence and restoration time of excessive impression incidents; and empower clients with richer insights to trace workload well being alerts for proactive mitigation.
Improvements for AI and rising workloads
From powering cutting-edge AI options to driving seamless cloud experiences, storage innovation has grow to be the spine of technological progress. However how do organizations keep forward on this quickly evolving panorama? The reply lies in targeted improvements—focused developments that rework how we handle, entry, and make the most of information.
Accelerating AI innovation with differentiated capabilities
In 2024, we superior massive language mannequin growth in collaboration with OpenAI, with Azure Storage serving as the muse for the AI lifecycle. At Ignite, we showcased how OpenAI leveraged Azure Blob Storage all through the lifecycle, from ingesting huge datasets for mannequin coaching to enabling seamless information administration and enlargement with out rising operational complexity. Such achievement is made attainable with Blob Storage scaled accounts offering extremely scalable throughput to forestall efficiency bottlenecks and simplify infrastructure. Extra of those capabilities that we’ve developed in collaboration with AI-scale clients comparable to OpenAI will are available in 2025. We can even carry these developments into Azure Information Lake Storage (ADLS) and provide extra clever capabilities on ADLS focusing on AI workloads for extra environment friendly information processing.
We’re engaged on an thrilling innovation that can seamlessly join unstructured information with Azure AI providers and different firms’ AI options, whether or not that information resides on-premises, in different clouds, or inside Azure. Constructing multi-modal enterprise AI purposes requires entry to huge quantities of unstructured information however enabling safe and well-governed entry to crucial enterprise information throughout cloud and on-premises environments is a significant problem for patrons. This rising answer will deal with the problem by securely connecting your information with Azure AI providers like Azure AI Foundry, and Azure Machine Studying, by means of their deep integration with Azure Blob—with out the necessity for information migration or copying. By accelerating entry to AI, decreasing time to perception, and enabling the logical unification of information from a number of sources, this answer will pave the best way for transformative developments in enterprise AI. With strong governance powered by instruments like Azure RBAC, it provides you with full management over your information property. The restricted preview of this answer might be out there quickly, with common availability deliberate for 2025.
Centered improvements for rising workloads
Because the cloud-first strategy turns into the default amongst startups and enterprises, we’re witnessing the emergence of recent data-centric workloads associated to AI coaching, safety scanning constructed on stateful containers. In response to rising demand of storage catered for containers, we launched Azure Container Storage, which presents a variety of storage choices through the native Kubernetes interface, with assist for brand spanking new block storage choices like ephemeral disks and Elastic SAN. That is particularly helpful for workloads hosted on digital machines (VMs) with graphics processing items (GPUs), the place terabytes of native NVMe can speed up mannequin coaching and inferencing. Furthermore, builders now not want to decide on between resiliency and pace for ephemeral disks. Azure Container Storage presents replication with versatile choices, making certain excessive resiliency inside or throughout zones and finest efficiency available on the market. In 2025, we are going to improve integration with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by streamlining the set up expertise and enhance cost-efficiency with common availability assist for Elastic SAN.
Optimizations for mission crucial workloads
We proceed to optimize the expertise for operating mission-critical workloads throughout our product portfolio. We delivered to the market—Azure Elastic SAN, optimized for price-performance at scale and seamless on-premises SAN migration to Azure. With the common availability of Azure VMware Resolution integration, clients can leverage it not just for VMs and containers but additionally as a local VMware datastore. We lately launched 99.99% uptime SLA assist, immediate snapshot (in preview) with Azure Backup (in preview), and capability auto-scaling (in preview). These capabilities solidify Elastic SAN as a number one alternative for enterprise storage at scale. Trying forward, we’re specializing in optimization for database and bare-metal use circumstances, decreasing entry latency and enhancing IOPS scalability, and advancing BCDR assist.
In parallel, we’re advancing our Disk choices to fulfill the rising wants of enterprises. To assist clients scale up database efficiency throughout peak site visitors, we launched Mbv3 VM collection, supporting as much as 650,000 disk IOPS—greater than a 50% enhance. We additionally enabled common availability for reside resizing on our Premium SSD v2/Extremely Disk choices, simplifying on-demand storage enlargement. With the added assist for disk kind conversion, clients can improve to those newest SKUs in place. Within the coming 12 months, we’re touchdown extra enhancements on Premium SSD v2/Extremely Disks together with automated catastrophe restoration through Azure Website Restoration (ASR), and Azure Migrate integration.
Azure NetApp Recordsdata (ANF) brings the power of NetApp ONTAP to the cloud as a local Azure service, providing broad protocol compatibility, and sub-millisecond latency. The overall availability launch of huge volumes, elevating the size from 50 TiB to 2 PiB with over 700,000 IOPS and 12.5 GiBps throughput, positions ANF to deal with mission crucial workloads in sectors like Digital Design Automation and high-performance computing (HPC). We’ll proceed optimizing cost-efficiency and enabling integration with Azure AI providers.
Azure Recordsdata presents absolutely managed file shares for hybrid, lift-and-shift and cloud native purposes. To carry you the advantages of pay-as-you-go pricing whereas offering predictable prices, we launched a brand new provisioning mannequin—Provisioned v2 on Normal Recordsdata. You may independently scale out the scale, IOPS, and throughput per workload necessities, ranging from 32 GiB. In 2025, our focus is to ease raise and shift of workloads with simplified administration and seamless information migration whereas enabling cloud native use circumstances with built-in id, and enhanced efficiency.
Main with our associate ecosystem
We proceed to strengthen our associate ecosystem to supply clients with alternative and ship strong hybrid administration capabilities adhering to excessive requirements for high quality and safety. In 2024, we collaborated with companions in delivering Komprise clever tiering for Azure and Veeam Information Cloud Vault constructed on Blob. We pleasure ourselves on joint innovation and are excited to announce upcoming releases in 2025:
- Nasuni Information Service will permit our joint clients to entry information saved in Nasuni UniFS through a Blob API suitable gateway.
- Pure Storage will launch a totally managed scalable block storage service on Azure.
- Dell will carry Dell-Managed as-a-Service choices of OneFS and Information Area to our joint clients.
Trying forward with Azure Storage
As we step into 2025, the horizon for storage innovation is extra thrilling than ever. With developments like AI-driven optimization, sustainable infrastructure, and lightning-fast entry speeds, we’re redefining what’s attainable in Azure Storage. The 12 months forward isn’t nearly storing extra—it’s about empowering companies to realize extra with smarter, scalable, and future-ready storage options. Right here’s to a 12 months of turning information into prospects!
